Work Experience
CareGo – Software Developer (CO-OP)
May 2022 – Jul 2022
I started working with CareGo in February 2022, where through Mohawk College we were given a choice of projects to complete with a set of given technology companies. I chose to join the team working with CareGo because I was intrigued by the application they planned on developing. The application we were assigned to create was a Truck Loading Utility, where we were given a list of long products (long pieces of square steel tubes) and had to load them onto the truck most stably and safely.
In Figure 1, you can see an example output of what one of these loads would look like. The load is oriented where the heaviest objects are placed at the bottom. Then the load is made up to look like a pyramid allowing for better stability as well as strapping down the material.
After I did the project with CareGo I decided to reach out to them about a possible co-op opportunity in the summer. CareGo graciously accepted the offer and I started working with them in the summer. Once I was employed at CareGo, I worked with the team in improving some of their web management applications. These applications that I worked on were used to help their clients understand what product is in their warehouse (long product or steel rolls). I updated some of the accessibility to features in their application which was using ASP.NET.
In addition at CareGo, I worked with business associates, in preparing client databases that manage all the operations of the automated crane warehouses. At the time all of this work was being done manually, copying data from one Excel file to another. With this being said I started to brainstorm better ways of accomplishing this task. On my own time, I started developing an application to make this more efficient, if this application was able to come to fruition, then it would be able to take a huge load off of the work not just for the developers, but for the business associates as well.
HATCH – Software Developer (CO-OP)
May 2021 – Dec 2021
I was given the opportunity to work at HATCH through my connections through Klearview and the robotics team that I mentor. Originally I was supposed to complete this co-op during the 2020 summer, but sadly covid shut down the whole world then. However, HATCH gave me the opportunity to instead complete the co-op during the next summer (2021).
Within the first week of my co-op, my manager approached me with an opportunity to rehaul one of their major applications that was no longer working. At the time the application was constantly being overwhelmed with their new larger datasets. On average it would take about 2 hours to compute 100,000 rows of data. My job was to clean up the code and move it to Azure Functions.
Once I started working on the comparison utility I found that there were a lot of bugs, and the code was not very readable. I started with understanding the application and adding comments to help me, and others understand what the application does. Once I had a hang of how the application worked I cleaned the bugs, and moved it to an Azure Function. At this point, there were still many bugs, and at the same time, there were more feature requests. To be able to clean up this code I decided to re-write a large portion and found out that the program was iterating through one of the lists inside the other, with the knowledge gained in the most recent semester I was able to come to a conclusion that the application was running at O(n2) which means that the more data, the slower the application would take to run. This made sense on why their 300,000-row dataset would not complete, with my calculation, for that size of data, it would take approx. 3 years.
After figuring out all the issues with the application, I met with my manager and proposed to completely re-write large portions of this application, I stated that I believe that I may be able to get the speed of the application to O(n) where instead of iterating over the entire list for each list item, I could store one of the lists in a HashSet and another in a Stack. Using these two data structures I can iterate over the Stack, pop off the top item, search the HashSet for the matching, and record if there were changes, deleted, or created.
After re-writing and cleaning up the code I was able to run a 300,000-row dataset in less than a minute, whereas before that would never have even been completed. Every dataset that I tested with would normally run within 2 – 20 seconds. Now that this application has been greatly improved, it is now realized that we may have not needed to move it to Azure Functions, but I was able to learn how to use them, as well as it still takes a load off the API, as no matter what, the datasets were still very large and very memory intensive.
After I finished the comparison utility, as I had so much fun with the type of work I was doing with HATCH I decided to extend my co-op term for another 4 months. In the second term, I continued to support the comparison utility, by adding new features and fixing bugs. I also updated security and features to multiple other applications within the company.
Tim Hortons – Team Leader
Dec 2018 – Dec 2019
I started working at Tim Hortons on a recommendation from my friend, as I previously worked at Mcdonald’s, I found it very easy to learn the systems there. Very quickly I progressed through my role at the job, I chose to try to learn as much as I could about the job to become an asset. I was trained as a baker within a month or so working at Tim Hortons. Since I was in High School at the time, I was able to balance my schoolwork 24 hours a week working.
After I graduated High School, I continued to work with Tim Hortons over the summer, working full time. My friend who at the time was a team leader, and was planning on moving to another city, recommended me to Tim Hortons to become a team leader. I then became a team leader, where I would manage the store, mainly in the evening, making sure that all the tasks were completed before the night staff came in. I did then become overwhelmed with college and robotics, and I had enough money to get myself through college, I decided to leave this position to help me focus more on my studies.
Community
FIRST Robotics – Mentor
Sep 2016 – Present
I started with the 2386 Trojans robotics team in grade 9 of High School. Before this, I was homeschooled learning coding, and my parents were able to set up a time frame for me to go into the High School to check it out and see if it was something I would be interested in. Once I entered the robotics lab, immediately my eyes lit up, and I looked like a kid in a candy store. I knew at this point I needed to be a part of this.
For the first year, however, I thought that the programming that they were using was too easy for me, and instead, I decided to join the field components sub-team. In the field components team, I worked with some other students on creating a version of the real game field out of wood, where I learned valuable skills in working with others, and woodwork.
In the next year of robotics, I was given the opportunity by one of the mentors to investigate and create a vision-tracking piece of software. In this role, I learned how to use the Raspberry PI computer, and OpenCV to create vision pipelines. With my piece of software added, the robot was able to auto-correct and drive directly toward a given vision target on the field.
Then in my grade 10 year, I became one of the programming leads, where I decided to have the team change programming languages from LabView to Java. There was also the opportunity to use C++, but we decided that it would be better to go with Java, as it is easier for new students to learn. I then worked directly with other students to implement new features, and also teach all the other students how to code.
After I graduated from High School, I decided that I would like to come back and mentor the team. I felt like I could really make a difference in my community by volunteering my time teaching new students how to code. To this day I am still the software mentor for this team, and the kids love to see me come in to help them learn coding.